Reviews
Saskia Baron
On the morning of the press show of Laughing Boy, the BBC news website’s top story was about the abuse of children with learning disabilities by the staff at a special school.The undercover investigation had revealed a catalogue of distressed young people being locked in rooms barely bigger than cupboards for hours, sometimes naked and with no access to toilets or food. Staff were filmed on CCTV repeatedly hitting and kicking children; but despite a joint police and local authority investigation that concluded six staff had abused children "on the balance of probabilities", they were not Read more ...
David Nice
While the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra were performing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – weirdly, despite its size and difficulty, a repertoire staple – over at the Royal Festival Hall, their Guildhall School counterparts presented a programme of stunning originality.It was, in effect, the final of student instrumentalists’ competition for the coveted Gold Medal, alternating with singers (their turn again in 2025). The draw for collectors of the rich and rare were Argentinian top composer Ginastera’s Harp Concerto and the Divertimento concertante for double bass and orchestra by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Towards the end of David Haig’s new adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 1956 science fiction short story, someone asks if three humans who have been symbiotically connected to a massive AI computer for a decade can survive the experience.Yes, she’s told, “if they stop surrendering their neurons to the organoid.” Just when I’d assumed the script could not get any more infuriating, I’m offered a line that wouldn’t have been out of place in Flash Gordon. Actually, this show may have benefitted from a little of that film's camp. Sadly it’s a noisy, frantic, heavy-handed spin on a typically Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It was her 2018 album Be the Cowboy which saw Mitski propelled to stardom status. Laurel Hell, which followed in 2022, saw her continue on the popstar trajectory with synth-heavy songs, so the more laid back folkiness of last year’s release, The Land is Inhospitable and So are We came as a bit of a surprise.Her gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall came with some deliberate seeming choices to cement her – at least for now – as a singer of folk-soaked country-style melodies as opposed to the brazen pop bangers of her last couple of records. The seats in the stalls remained, with the whole gig being Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Small-scale shows, nurtured in offbeat places, are becoming all the rage in the West End. Red Pitch, Operation Mincemeat, For Black Boys… have already made their mark, and now this quirky musical for just two performers joins them.It’s been a long journey, starting in Norwich and Northampton and followed by Kilburn, where the show opened last Christmas at the Kiln Theatre. Appropriate timing, since the musical is set in December with one entertaining song about the insistent horrors of the Xmas musical standards, but it works just as sweetly in the Criterion in April.Illusions and reality Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Masaaki Suzuki has not just travelled into pastures new but proved himself thoroughly at home in them. The founder-director (in 1990) of Bach Collegium Japan, a distinguished harpsichordist-organist as well as one of the most rigorous and scholarly interpreters of the Baroque legacy, has just completed a tour with the Philharmonia that joyfully embraced a selection of Romantic masterworks. They returned from Spain to the Royal Festival Hall (pictured below) with a programme that saw Suzuki, stick-less and relaxed but fiercely attentive to every fine Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
First Nadine Shah raised hopes, then dashed them. “I’ve never had a dance off onstage before,” she observed at one point, impressed by the shapes a crowd member was cutting, before confirming it wouldn’t be happening on this evening either. You’d have backed Shah to triumph too, given how the rest of the gig showcased her skills with style.Dressed in a black power suit that suggested she could tangle with Melanie Griffth and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, Shah has both a superb voice and a terrific stage presence. She prowled around on the opening “Even Light”, all nervy, tense rhythms, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 1903, Wassily Kandinsky painted a figure in a blue cloak galloping across a landscape on a white horse. Several years later the name of the painting, The Blue Rider (der Blaue Reiter) was adopted by a group of friends who joined forces to exhibit together and disseminate their ideas in a publication of the same name.The key members were Kandinsky and his partner Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, Marianne von Werefkin and her partner Alexej von Jawlensky, both Russian aristocrats. The group was based in Munich, but keen to emphasise their internationalism, they invited others to show with them, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
On Friday evening, dance veterans Orbital touched down in Birmingham to celebrate two of the most significant and acclaimed albums in rave culture. These discs may both be over 30 years old, but the Brummies were out in force, packed into an overfull O2 Institute, and lapped it up.Paul and Phil Hartnoll’s Green and Brown albums, along with Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman and the Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, were pretty much responsible for giving the early 1990s wave of electronic dance music a credibility far beyond the clubs and the outdoor raves – and were more than Read more ...
Veronica Lee
An appearance on Taskmaster and the publication of her acclaimed memoir Strong Female Character have helped propel Fern Brady into the comedy big time – and now comes the accolade of her first Netflix special, Autistic Bikini Queen, which was recorded in Bristol last year.She fesses up at the top of the show that, despite its title, this hour is not exclusively about her autism, which she was diagnosed with in her mid-thirties. She does, though, update us on how the condition affects her and which, she quickly informs us, is not a superpower – there's a withering putdown of that notion – but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Lemon Twigs aren’t shy about telegraphing their inspirations. A Dream is all we Know, their swift follow-up to last May’s Everything Harmony, is stuffed with references. “Sweet Vibration” is rooted in The Left Banke’s “She May Call You up Tonight.” “In the Eyes of the Girl” draws from The Beach Boys’s “Girls on the Beach.” Album opener “My Golden Years” nods to second album Big Star. Todd Rundgren looms large over the album’s title track.Brian and Michael D’Addario’s bold fifth album needs, though, to have more going for it than good taste and evidence for a cool record collection to make Read more ...
David Nice
Four years embracing pandemic, genocide and rapid environmental degradation predicted by Wagner’s grand myth have passed before the Southbank Brünnhilde could become a new woman – literally, in this Ring. Since Das Rheingold, the “preliminary evening”, in 2018, the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski has grown ever more idiomatic and resplendent. Casting of the main roles, however, had more than its usual peaks and troughs this time round.You suspect that there's a second league of singers when it comes to Wagner interpretation in the round who always give the same kind of Read more ...